Joe Firmage on Art Bell NOW 11pm LA time...

Has an interesting perspective on y2k - multi millionaire - ceck out thewordistruth.com.

interview avail. later on realaudi at artbell.com

Andy

Two digits. One mechanism. The smallest mi$take.

"The conveniences and comforts of humanity in general will be linked up by one mechanism, which will produce comforts and conveniences beyond human imagination. But the smallest mistake will bring the whole mechanism to a certain collapse. In this way the end of the world will be brought about."

Also you may want to check out this article that appeared in a local
Silicon Valley Metro Newsprint magazine about a month ago:

Truth and Consequences

When USWeb replaced company founder Joe Firmage as CEO, two things
became clear. One, in the boardrooms of Silicon Valley, you don't get
to believe in space aliens. And two, the world isn't ready for
anything billed as The Truth, whether it's true or not...

That link now says The page you're trying to reach has moved or is
otherwise missing in action or you entered an invalid URL. Luckily,
I lifted the full-text (WARNING -- LONG POST):

Truth and Consequences

Truth Sayer:

Silicon Valley Wunderkind Joe Firmage says the moment has arrived for
the world to embrace the truth, and President Clinton should tell it:
space aliens have visited the earth.

Christopher Gardner

When USWeb replaced company founder Joe Firmage as CEO, two things
became clear. One, in the boardrooms of Silicon Valley, you don't get
to believe in space aliens. And two, the world isn't ready for
anything billed as The Truth, whether it's true or not.

By Michael Learmonth [mikel@sjmetro.com]

NOTHING about Joseph P. Firmage seems the slightest bit ethereal, a
hard thing to reconcile considering the events of recent weeks. Forty-
five minutes after our meeting was scheduled to start, I am ushered
down a busy hall in a Santa Clara office building and shown into his
corner office at USWeb, where the young executive sits busily tapping
his keyboard. Without turning away from his computer, Firmage asks me
to take a seat. At 28, he's a decamillionaire with two wildly
successful high-tech startups under his belt.

Having founded USWeb in 1995 and in three years built it into a public
company worth about $1 billion, Firmage has made himself and a lot of
other people very rich, very fast. Firmage founded his first company,
Serius Corp, when he was just 18. Those who know him seem to fall into
two camps: those who think he's brilliant, and those who think he's a
genius.

Firmage is a prodigy in a valley full of sharpies, but I've come to
his office today to be pitched on a rather fantastic proposition, even
by Silicon Valley standards. Firmage spins around in his leather
chair.

"I am directly challenging the scientific presumption against the
viability of visitation by extraterrestrials. And I have the evidence
to show for it that will be published tomorrow," Firmage tells me as
matter-of-factly and confidently as if he were pitching a business
plan.

Firmage wears a dark shirt and slacks; precisely trimmed facial hair
frames his squarish jaw. Over the past year he has worked nonstop on a
work he has titled The Truth, a 600-page hypothesis appearing on the
Web site www.thewordistruth.org, all the while running USWeb, a
company which now has more than 1000 employees in more than 50 offices
on three continents.

(A subsidiary of Metro's parent company owned one of those offices
until earlier this year and remains a stockholder of USWeb
Corporation.)

Firmage has granted scant interviews, and indeed this meeting is
squeezed between pressing engagements and several days spent in
seclusion where he worked on the completion of the final chapters of
his book. He speaks slowly and precisely like a seasoned orator,
repeating the words "wondrous" and "astonishing." His intonations and
gestures convey a CEO's unwavering confidence in his ideas, as they
should.

Until last month, Firmage was CEO of USWeb, but then he committed the
Wall Street equivalent of hanging crystals and burning incense in his
office: he started talking about aliens and ideas and capital-T Truth.
When his Web site started getting hits, it was mere weeks until the
company issued a press release announcing his transition from "CEO" to
"founder and chief strategist."

His grand strategy had been to create what he envisioned would be the
greatest professional services firm of the Internet age, helping
companies redesign their infrastructure as network computing absorbed
print publishing, telephony and broadcasting in successive waves and
cheap bandwidth became plentiful. First selling franchises to Web
development operators coast-to-coast, USWeb then went on an
acquisition binge, swallowing up more than 30 companies in less than
two years. Finally, it bought out a pioneering Silicon Valley Web
developer, the publicly traded advertising agency CKS Group, in a
stock transaction valued at $326 million. The merger is scheduled to
be completed by year's end, and the combined entity will be known as
USWeb/CKS.

USWeb's stock price, however, plunged to nearly half its pre-
announcement value after the two companies announced their intent to
merge Sept. 2, and the stock was rebounding slowly. Firmage had
successfully seen the company through its growth and IPO and had
established key partnerships with Intel, Microsoft and NBC, but word
of Firmage's extracurricular research trickled out and both the
fragile stock price and USWeb's ability to get consulting business
from blue chip corporations was being placed at risk. Board member
Gary Rieschel was quoted in a trade publication as saying, "Our
competitors were highlighting this to the media and calling Joe a
crackpot." As USWeb's largest individual shareholder, the notion that
Firmage fell on his sword voluntarily is not implausible. Whatever the
genesis, the gambit worked, and USWeb's stock price jumped more than
two points on the news of the new CEO's appointment.

Stepping down, Firmage says with the confidence of a person who knows
how the world works and figures he can win anyway, "was my choice and
enthusiastically so." A CEO transition had long been in the works, he
says, and he had already chosen his successor, Oracle VP and Silicon
Valley A-lister Robert Shaw. The timing of Firmage's side project and
the CEO transition was purely coincidental, he says, although a board
member says there was an element of cause and effect. Shaw's
appointment was supposed to coincide with the CKS merger.

But as traditional-thinking board members got wind of Firmage's new
project and stories started popping up in USA Today, the San Jose
Mercury News and the Internet Industry Standard, the transition
timetable was hastened.

"We probably would have waited until post-merger to complete [the
transition]," concedes board member Gary Reischel, whose venture firm,
Softbank Holdings, owns the largest single share of the company. "Joe
was frustrated because maybe the time was accelerated. While before we
were thinking in terms of a month, we did it instead in a week."

BUT FOR FIRMAGE, this was no weirder than another pivotal moment in
USWeb history: the one a year ago in which a sleep-deprived Firmage
underwent an experience that catalyzed his Truth project.

In the chapter "My Contact," Firmage writes that in the white-hot
weeks leading up to USWeb's IPO, a year ago, he was awakened by his
alarm at 6:10am one morning but then he decided to hit the snooze
instead of going to the gym.

"A remarkable being, clothed in brilliant white light, appeared
hovering over my bed in my room," he writes. "Out of him emerged an
electric blue sphere, just smaller than a basketball, which was
swirling with what looks like electrical arcs. It left his body,
floated down, and entered me."

Firmage soon founded the International Space Sciences Organization
with $3 million of his own money to administer a project he called
"Kairos," a Greek word meaning "the right moment" or "a critical
time." Firmage believes we live in a "kairos" in which humanity is
finally advanced enough to comprehend alien beings.

Despite my skepticism, I find myself locked into conversation with
Firmage. He expects his book to cause the kind of stir that could get
all of our minds off impeachment and the NBA lockout and inspire
President Bill to discuss with the American people another kind of
truth.

The book will reveal, Firmage says, the most "astonishing" proof to
date that extraterrestrial beings have been making cameo appearances
on Earth for about the last 2,000 years, and that 51 years ago the
"teachers," as he calls them, revealed themselves to the U.S.
government in the New Mexico desert, planting the seeds of the digital
age. Firmage says that most of what we here in Silicon Valley have
"created" and innovated was originally derived from an alien spaceship
crash in Roswell, N.M., the wreckage of which was "reverse engineered"
and released to select companies by the government over the last 50
years.

THE WORD "ROSWELL" causes my heart to sink like a heavy glass in
dishwater, making a glugging sound on its way down. Out of all of the
words Firmage could have said, this is probably the only one that
would stop me cold. He may as well have said "X-Files."

To some degree the world can be divided into two camps: those who are
open to believing the Earth has been visited by extraterrestrials, and
those who are not. Although I suspect it puts me in some rather
uninspired company, I have to place myself among the latter. Working
as a reporter who routinely observes and chronicles the workings of
government and bureaucracy, I have difficulty believing that any
public or private agency, knowing about Roswell, would be able to keep
it under wraps for so long.

But even though the skeptics clearly have most of the observable
evidence on their side, Firmage is right when he refers to the knee-
jerk skeptics in the scientific community as "scientific
fundamentalists, the ultimate reductionists," who are as dogmatic as
religious fundamentalists in dismissing the idea of alien visitors.
The majority of Firmage's collaborators on The Truth have asked to
remain anonymous, as association with such a project could lead to
professional ridicule in academia or in the high-tech labs where many
a good ufologist makes a living.

Firmage decided that he is in a good position to take the inevitable
heat that positing a hypothesis like The Truth is sure to bring.

He says, "I chose to basically take the risk for everybody's sake and
put my own career on the line."

But why?

"I have the money to do it," he says. "I have the desire to do it. I
think it's more important than my career."

Firmage is smart, genuine and personable. He may be on the verge of
becoming the most credible spokesman for this other world view. During
the week of the publication of The Truth, Firmage placed ads in The
Economist, Civilization, Rolling Stone, Harvard Business Review and
the Wall Street Journal, on National Public Radio and at numerous
sites online. Though he could certainly afford to do more, he's
instructed a publicist to only respond to inquiries, mindful of the
backlash he could incur should he flog his book too hard.

"All Joe wants is for everyone on the planet to read his book," says
Melinda Mattei, publicist for the project. "That's his goal."

I ask Firmage what he hopes will be the outcome of the book, and he is
succinct.

"Well, as this thing gets published tomorrow, I know there will be
many eyes reading it in government, in the military and in private
industry who know the basic storyline has a lot of grounding in
truth," he says, acknowledging that a work this size "no doubt will
contain some errors."

The scenario Firmage hopes will follow is that every week for the next
two months people with information will be emboldened to come forward.
"I would not hazard a specific guess or timeline," he says, "but in my
ideal world I would like President Clinton to have the courage to
stand up on national television and tell the real story. He's in a
position to do it."

ASIDE FROM his early-morning epiphany, Firmage's impetus for the
writing of The Truth was the discovery of 96 pages of documents in the
possession of a Redwood City physicist and ufologist, Robert Wood.
Scans of the documents are now posted on Firmage's Web site and
available for anyone to download for free. The documents, which
Firmage believes to be authentic, describe a vast U.S. government
operation known as "Majestic 12," allegedly headed by Dr. Vannevar
Bush and charged with recovering the spaceships that crashed in the
United States between 1947 and 1953.

In 1947, it was still almost a decade before designers at General
Motors got space-chic and started putting tail fins on cars, and the
concept of even a pocket calculator would have seemed miraculous. At
the time, Firmage believes, keeping the flying saucer a secret was
necessary and prudent to avoid mass hysteria. But now, in the age of
fiber optics, the international space station and the iMac (all made
possible, in part, by aliens, by the way), humanity is ready to know
the Truth and Bill Clinton had better stop fondling the interns and
fess up.

The real story, he says, begins at the end of World War II. Near one
of the military bases where the nascent nuclear program was being
developed, a spacecraft fell from the heavens. Inside the craft were
several beings that were not human.

"The craft had all sorts of wondrous technologies in it," Firmage
explains, "technologies that ultimately gave rise to fiber optics,
integrated circuits; new materials used throughout the defense
industry in America. Fundamental technologies were derived from that
event, in addition to several it has taken several years to figure
out, such as, How do you use gravity to propel yourself? How do you
tap into an inexhaustible supply of energy the size of a basketball?"

Firmage is getting emphatic. He is convincing, even mesmerizing. He
spins around and picks up his phone.

"Hey, Bonnie, could you bring in one of those physics packages?"

His executive assistant, Bonnie Murphy, comes in with a spiral-bound
sheaf of Xeroxes--scientific papers written by Harold E. Puthoff, a
physicist at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Austin.

Puthoff has been researching the feasibility of creating energy where
there is nothing--in a vacuum. In the course of his study he has also
written papers on how space could be warped so that the speed of light
could vary. Then, theoretically, one could travel faster than the
speed of light within the general law of relativity.

Firmage's formal physics education ended in college, but he pursues it
fervently as a hobby. The faster he sees physics coming closer and
closer to explaining something resembling Gene Roddenberry's warp
drive, the more he believes that all of this has been done before and
that we are bumbling students of a benevolent civilization of cosmic
tutors who have visited earth through the ages and left clues that can
be found in the Bible, the Koran, in science laboratories and in
science fiction.

ONE OF THE ONLY scientific journals to take any of this alien
visitation stuff seriously is the Journal of Scientific Exploration
[http://www.jse.com/], published by the Society for Scientific
Exploration in Redwood City. In June, the society sponsored the first
independent review of UFO phenomena since 1970. The review panel,
convened at Stanford University and led by Stanford professors Peter
Sturrock and Von Eschelman, concluded that some UFO sightings deserve
further scientific study.

It was a significant finding by the Stanford astrophysicists, given
the amateur nature of most UFO investigations--a legitimation,
perhaps, that there is enough credible evidence to warrant funding UFO
research.

Bernhard Haisch is editor-in-chief of the journal and a staff
physicist at Lockheed Martin. Haisch has quite a bit of respect for
Firmage, but as a work of scientific study he gives The Truth a mixed
review.

"He has an impressive depth of knowledge for someone who is not a
physicist," Haisch says of Firmage. "He's one of the brighter people
I've ever met. He's quite capable of carrying on sophisticated
conversations in areas where he's not a trained researcher. To pull
this together in this time scale alone tells me he's a genius."

Although Haisch claims the Journal takes "no position pro or con" on
extraterrestrials, the lead commentary on the society's Web site this
month is titled "Be Skeptical of the 'Skeptics.' " Haisch shares
Firmage's ire toward the scientists who dismiss ufology out of hand.

"Most of my colleagues have a mindset as firmly held as a religious
belief," he says. "They pretend it's objective and rational, but the
world view is very restrictive and dogmatic."

While Haisch is open to compelling evidence of a UFO coverup--
including the new Majestic 12 documents contained in The Truth--he has
a hard time going where Firmage went with his analysis.

The idea that many of the basic elements of information-age
technology--the microelectronics, fiber optics, advanced alloys--were
derived from technology found on an alien spacecraft is enough to
bring out the "skeptic" in him.

"Working in high tech, I see ideas evolve all the time," Haisch
argues. "I'm not a historian but I understand that the transistor had
a well-documented pedigree. Now, I don't know anything about fiber
optics, so I can't say."

COULD FIBER OPTICS have been derived from alien technology? Firmage
says the new documents prove Majestic researchers "pulled out gobs of
stuff they called fishing wire" from the spaceship wreckage. "It was
fiber optics they pulled out, and they didn't even know what they were
doing."

Did this spaceship discovery plant the idea on Earth that light could
bend if it was shone through a translucent cylinder?

When asked the question, Woodside resident Narinder Kapany lets out an
uproarious belly laugh into the speaker phone.

"That makes me a spaceman!" he shouts. "I love it!"

Dr. Kapany, who now works for Amp Inc., invented fiber optics and
coined the term in 1955. And though that was indeed eight years after
Roswell, Kapany says the history of fiber optics has its roots in
1940s India.

"The true story," Kapany says, began "when I was a young boy."

Kapany says he remembers his science teacher lecturing on light and
explaining that one of its characteristics is it always travels in a
straight line.

"I said to myself, 'Hell, no, it doesn't!' It became almost an
obsession of mine to bend light around corners."

Kapany started by using trains of prisms lined up to move beams of
light, but the light itself still traveled in a straight line between
prisms. The quandary puzzled Kapany until he arrived in London to
attend the Imperial College. He posed the question over tea to a
professor who suggested he try cylindrical geometry.

"That led me to fibers," Kapany says. "The initial impetus to work on
this thing is what I called 'flexible fiber scope.' The idea was to
use it as an instrument to look into the body."

When Kapany came to the U.S., he realized fiber optics would have
numerous other applications. The military used the technology for
night-vision equipment in Vietnam. In the 1970s, silica was introduced
by Charles Kao, who worked for ITT.

Was Kao a spaceman?

No, Kapany says; he was a graduate student in England who came to the
U.S. to work for ITT.

The point is, if anyone involved in the development of fiber optics
was "seeded," it was Kapany.

"Of course there have been numerous other individuals who have made
contributions," Kapany says. "I just happened to be the earliest one.
The spaceman."

My Contact, an excerpt from The Truth.

Is it alien-made or just weird?

All of The Truth, according to Joe Firmage.

News stories about Firmage stepping down from C|Net, The Industry
Standard and The San Francisco Chronicle.

BUT IF OTHER technologies were "seeded" by extraterrestrials in the
late '40s and early '50s, surely there would be some old-timers around
Silicon Valley who are keeping a secret. Who are they? Firmage can't
be sure. One thing certain, though, is these guys aren't getting any
younger. The sooner the president and the Congress waive the oaths of
secrecy, Firmage argues, the more likely some of these aging engineers
will still be around to talk about it.

Philip Corso, author of The Day After Roswell, died just a few weeks
ago, but not before signing a slew of testaments and affidavits
alleging he witnessed the alien-to-earthling transfer take place.

"It's full of some exaggeration," Firmage says, "but the basic
storyline is absolutely factual."

One of those men who could have been privy to such a transfer is
Redwood City physicist Wood, who worked for McDonnell Douglas for 43
years and retired in 1993. Wood is working with Firmage and other
experts to authenticate the Majestic 12 documents. Now 70, Wood
started his career working on radar technology and finished up working
on the International Space Station, the first American part of which
was launched into space last week.

"During my career I did not think, 'Gee, am I looking at alien
technology?' " Wood says. "But looking back, one of my radar
colleagues said he saw specific instances where this occurred."

Wood is fairly certain he was never passed alien technology, but he
did watch the way U.S. government researchers dealt with downed MiGs.

"If a Soviet MiG [jet fighter] crashes, we send it to a lab," Wood
explains. "If we don't understand it, we send it to a contractor with
a classified contract and don't necessarily tell where we got it."

That, Wood believes, would be how parts of a spaceship would trickle
into private industry. "The government has the material and they pass
it to various labs for analysis. They get that analysis and they give
it to Bell Labs or Dupont, and they work on it to develop patents."

Wood and his son Ryan are in the process of tracking down researchers
they believe were well-placed to receive alien technology. Not
surprisingly, when they're found, few are willing to violate the oaths
they took 50 years ago.

"The truth of whether something has been reverse engineered is out
there," Wood says. "It's in the national archives and the national
patent office. It's there to be found."

AT THE CENTER OF The Truth are the 96 pages of new documents,
including a letter from Albert Einstein and Robert Oppenheimer to
Vannevar Bush dated June 1947 outlining what the scientists believed
we should do if we encountered aliens, a memo from President Truman to
Secretary of Defense James Forrestal establishing the Majestic 12
program that researched and concealed alien spacecraft starting in
1947, and a Majestic 12 special operations manual titled
"Extraterrestrial Entities and Technology, Recovery and Disposal."

The origin of the documents, besides what can be forensically
determined, is the Big Bear Lake mailbox of a man named Timothy
Cooper. They were left there between1992 and 1996 by a man claiming to
be Thomas Cantwheel who was allegedly in charge of one of the Majestic
12 recoveries. Bob Wood has been looking for Cantwheel, but at age 92
there's a good change he's already dead.

Cooper gave the documents to Wood, who has determined the bulk of them
to be authentic after two years of research conducted by a team of
experts in the field.

"Bob Wood is a very smart guy," vouches Bernhard Haisch. "His
assessments are true and honest. He's not out there to make money."

If the documents are fakes, they are certainly masterful ones. Wood
says they are written exactly the way such memos would have been at
the time, following the obscure National Security Agency chain-of-
command. They contain arcane routing numbers that were the protocol of
the day. They are printed on 8-by-10.5-inch paper instead of 8-by-11-
inch, a wartime effort to save paper. They use the word "neutronic"
when referring to the engines; "nuclear" had not yet been coined.
Finally, there are the little touches. "Screw driver" is used instead
of the modern "screwdriver," and there are spelling errors. Such
errors were common at a time when memos were dictated to secretaries;
thus, they add to the authenticity.

Others, such as Vannevar Bush biographer G. Pascal Zachary, concluded
that the documents were fakes after reviewing them with historians and
finding errors and inconsistencies. "I don't believe that Bush was
involved in any secret committee to review or cover up the Roswell
incident," says Zachary, former editor of the San Jose Business
Journal and now with The Wall Street Journal's London office.

While rejecting a central role by Bush, Zachary allows, "that doesn't
mean that the whole Majestic project didn't exist. Maybe some of those
other people [named in the document] were involved. Obviously the
Pentagon and others withheld information regarding the Roswell
incident."

The documents say that the spacecraft found uses no fuel but instead
some kind of gravitational propulsion technology. According to
Firmage, this technology is still being kept a secret despite the fact
that mainstream physics is about to discover it anyway.

"It's very much like the classic warp drive science fiction concept
working here," he says. "You set up a gravitational field and
literally fall toward your destination."

Also included in the 96 pages are descriptions of several life forms
found on board the ship and the autopsies allegedly conducted on them.

The Majestic 12 papers also outline how this was all kept a secret. In
a press release, Firmage writes, "A security infrastructure more
impenetrable than any in world history was put into place, in part
through the establishment of the National Security Act of 1947.
Through various intelligence vehicles, a program for 'control of the
press' was instituted ensuring that leaks were closed and any open
scientific investigation discredited."

BEYOND THE X-FILES intrigue, the truth according to Joseph P. Firmage
is a postmodern reinterpretation of holy scripture. He argues that
most major biblical events actually happened pretty much as described,
orchestrated by "teachers" or angels who appeared throughout history
to bring needed lessons to our rambunctious race.

"Why do we call them angels?" Firmage asks. "Because it's a nicer term
than aliens."

Firmage was raised in Salt Lake City as a Mormon, but he abandoned the
faith as a teenager when he "began to have questions about the more
dogmatic aspects of the religion." Mormonism, or the Church of Jesus
Christ of Latter-day Saints, requires followers to believe in direct
human-angel contact. According to Mormon doctrine, the founder of the
sect, Joseph Smith, was contacted by the angel Mormoni in1827 and
guided to the sacred golden tablets from which the Book of Mormon was
written. Smith translated the inscriptions on the tablets from
"reformed Egyptian" with special glasses, and the tablets were then
taken away, again by angels.

Firmage told me he hadn't been to church in 13 years, but that through
the process of writing The Truth he has "rediscovered" his faith.
"It's expanded my mind a bit and has been a re-education on concepts
that I was taught when I was young."

In the last chapter of The Truth, titled "My Apology," Firmage writes
what appears to be an apology to Jesus for having doubted the veracity
of the crucifixion. To Firmage, the new evidence finally proves that
this well-documented biblical event actually happened under the
guiding hand of the "teachers."

The greatest truth I have learned in my life is that you exist. With
that knowledge, I have now imagined the pain and anguish you felt, as
I hated and convicted you, drove the nails through your feet, your
hands, and then posted you in the air. As your blood dripped with pain
from your limbs, and from your forehead, I stabbed you.

Your blood was my sword.

I am so terribly sorry.

Until now, mainstream science hasn't left a whole lot of wiggle room
for the Mr. Spocks among us to indulge their spiritual side. Even
scientists want to believe that we, here on this wondrous place we
call Earth, were intended for something better than building a better
mousetrap, faster microchips and more roads and strip malls until
we're all heaving soot and living in spiritual and aesthetic squalor.

"You have a whole generation of young people who don't know what to
believe anymore," Firmage explains. "Religion was killed by science;
science was killed by economics. Do they really want to grow up and do
nothing other than join the rat race to make money? Is that worth
living for?"

Firmage has found a way to reconcile his scientific mind with a
theology that reinforces his past, explains the miracle of humanity on
earth and gives him hope for the future.

"This is not a new religion," Firmage argues; "it is not some hocus-
pocus conjecture. In every chapter, in every sense, it's grounded in
demonstrable ideas and levelheaded reality, at the same time dealing
with astonishing information that will prove one day soon to transform
society in a lot of dimensions."

That the reality according to Firmage challenges the basic beliefs of
many people and provides a gleeful target for society's cynics doesn't
seem to bother him. He finds solace in the belief that one day we will
all understand.

"I could care less what xyz publication prints about me," he says.
"The one thing I'm most comforted by is history will be my judge."